Brush Up Your Shakespeare

What would it be like if the world found a new Shakespeare play? I have had the equivalent experience–seeing a Shakespeare play I had never before seen, or read.

I have never seen All’s Well That Ends Well on any list of the bard’s ten best (nor, to be fair, on any list of his stinkers). Somehow I missed it, despite being an English major and a fairly earnest reader.

I caught the production that just closed in New York, featuring Laurie Kennedy, wife of NR-great Keith Mano, in the role of the Countess of Rousillon. I didn’t offer an earlier heads-up to Cornerites because the production sold out instantly, on the strength of a well-deserved rave in the New York Times.

How does Shakespeare play, without the familiarity of a classic? (The aura can’t be scraped away entirely, because we still know who the playwright is, and we’ve seen certain features–blank verse, syntax both dense and rapid, lower class buffoons, virtuous heroines–many times before.) The production certainly helped. The house was small; everyone spoke clearly and meaningfully. The director also added bits of business to beef up comic scenes, and the very end.

But the play more than stands on its own two feet. The main problem is gripping. Helena loves Bertram, who doesn’t love her back. She pursues him with a devotion that is just short of painful. He seems like a fool–except that his freedom is at stake. Why should he marry a woman just because she and his mother want him to, and the king commands it? The subplot turns on Parolles, a blowhard who fools some of the characters into thinking he’s a bigshot. His pretensions, and his downfall are both funny.

The passage that struck me: “The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill, together; our virtues would be proud if our faults whipped them not, and our crimes would despair if they were not cherished by our virtues.” (I looked that speech up later, which you obviously can’t do with every playwright; it’s in prose, which makes it harder to remember.) Second striking line: Bertram’s next to last: “Both, both.” Nothing in print, but powerful in context.

So the old boy can still hold a stage. That, I recall, was what Tolstoy said was the secret of his meretricious charm. That’s right, Count Leo, and you had similar charms, when you had any.